Angry Planet - Presidents, Vice Presidents, and Assassinations

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an Angry Planet. Thanks for letting us kick up our heels this August, it was a rough one. We may not have been releasing, but we WERE recording.The first episode upon our return is with terrorism and vice presidency expert Aaron Mannes. Mannes is lecturer at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and was one of the first people to use big data sets to study terrorist group behavior. These days he’s really into vice presidents. We sat down with him for a wide-ranging conversation that covered everything from Aaron Burr to the Bonus Army.Why are America and Israel all-in on assassination?International relations versus the domestic tensionsStats out of dead bodiesAssassination: Obama StyleThe terrorist’s dilemmaMatthew immediately figures out how wrong he isThe case for Aaron BurrThe Bonus ArmyTaking a shot at the vice presidentAnalyzing Assassination Plots Against VPsSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. It's Matthew and Jason again. Who wants to talk about assassinations, targeted killings? Someone took a shot at Trump.

Israel assassinated a Hamas leader in Tehran. there's been a lot of targeted killings in the news. So we wanted us wanted an assassination expert, and I saw a thread on Twitter or X that caught my eye. And its author is here with us today. Sir, can you introduce yourself? So I'm Aaron Manus. Thank you for having me on. But let's, I'm not sure I'm an assassination expert.

I have not assassinated very many people myself or of an amateur. But I have studied the issue. Academically. You are or were in the past, I should say, because your life is different now than it was 10 years ago. You were someone who studied targeted killings and terrorist groups academically. That is a more accurate statement. I have been involved in terrorism research for a couple of decades. I've done quantitative and qualitative, and I've been involved with computer labs that did some really cool cutting edge.

data analytics on terrorist group behavior. So yeah. So can you kind of walk us through right before we jumped on the call, you said that you had planned to turn this thread that you'd written into a paper? And I'm kind of wondering if you can just kind of walk us through that thread and like its main points and why it was on your mind. So back in 2006, I was getting my PhD. I had to do a stat paper. I don't do math so good.

I got through my stat requirements because I happened to be married to a statistician who walked me through it. But I had this revelation. The guy teaching the class, great guy, he did polling. I said, well, let me go do a topic that I know a lot more about than he does. I was a terrorism expert. So I asked this question, because it was sort of assumed. logic that you take out the leader of a terrorist group and that's a win. The group falls apart.

Well, let me study that. So I gathered a lot of data and I ran some basic regressions and came to some results. Now, and I was one of the first people to do a statistical study. There have been others since. It's definitely moved. That question is definitely moved forward. But they all cite me, which is kind of cool. overall, my results and the results overall are kind of inconclusive.

First of all, let me just say the data is murky. Right. I mean, this is terrorist group behavior. And then you have questions about how do you count things? Do you count how many people were killed? Well, that's one thing you can count. Do you count the number of incidents? Well, how do you count an incident?

You know, I was just rereading my paper because it has been 20 years, well, 18 years. I think my paper could vote now. So, you know, I use the example. If you, in theory, if you set up four pipe bombs in different locations, that's four incidents. And you could also count 9-11. It's four incidents. Well, that clearly doesn't make sense. So what are you even counting?

And then the date is murky. And they're terrorist groups. There's a lot you don't know about them. But what I found was the more robust degree, the greater at survivability. And that the sort of small leftist extremist groups of Europe of the 60s, 70s and 80s, you'd arrest their leaders and they'd collapse. These are really small groups, whereas Hezbollah doesn't collapse so easy. Hezbollah is kind of a proto state.

you know, taking out a couple people at the top, they've got a betch. That being said, some of that could be the artifacts of when I gathered the data. You know, there were other periods where the leftist group seemed extremely robust. They were running large-scale insurgencies throughout the developing world. So it's dicey. The research since, same thing. There are people who come down on one side, targeted killings are not effective. There are people who come down on the other.

I was just looking at a study that talked about, well, who are you taking out? Are you taking out the top tier? You take taking out middle management, the ground level commanders. What I would say is you want to be doing this research. You want to do more research. You want to fuse it with the statistical approach with qualitative analysis, with organizational studies, and really think about it in terms of that group and what you're trying. to achieve. Okay, that's the big picture. Let me take a breath because I can, you know,

I'm a professor in another life, so I can just talk for an hour, but nobody wants, you know, you don't want that. So would you let me know where you want me to hone in on things? Well, so I was just thinking that we've been working very, very hard over the last drone years in trying to target individuals more than ever before, I think. maybe it's because we have the tools, maybe that's an right. I'm just kind of wondering what's behind it and how is that affected our success rate as far as you can tell. And I apologize for sounding like a frog. Great and really hard question.

In my professor life, what I actually teach about is national security decision making. And you see the push and pull between what's the best policy and what makes, what's a good political policy. And politics is not a dirty word, right? You need people to support your policy. So you can understand why a nation even, it's not clear that bin Laden was running al-Qaeda when we got him. Were you the president and you thought you had a pretty clear shot at the guy?

Were you going to say no to getting the man who did this terrible thing? And you need public support. So if you have a social, that says if somebody hits us, we, we get them. If you don't follow that, there's a cost. I think in a lot of cases, though, there is a tension between what makes sense for internal politics and what makes sense in sort of the grand scheme of things. What makes sense geopolitically. And, you know, I are tight, international relations types are often frustrated at the domestic implications for foreign policy, that they prevent us for pursuing optimal policies. And I think you can see some of that.

Is removing leaders always the smartest move, not clear? Look, our ability to remove leaders did not get us to victory in Afghanistan, but in fairness, maybe we weren't going to get to victory in Afghanistan. We have degraded terrorist threats and lots of corners of the world. But then, so in Pakistan, we were running a pretty extensive drone campaign in the late 2000s, early 2010s. Did it remove terrorist leaders? Yes. Did it have very high political costs within Pakistan and with that relationship with the Pakistani government? also yes, which is more important.

I'm just stating the tradeoffs. I can't say anything's right or wrong. Look, these are bad guys. We also made mistakes, and that's, I mean, that's inherent to the business, but that doesn't make the people in the receiving end of the mistakes feel any better about it, right? That's part of the cost. So which is more important removing some bad guys who are very bad, and I don't object to removing them in principle, or the broader shape of Pakistan's politics,

a nation that's close to 200 million people, has nuclear weapons, and is in a constant state of almost collapse, you know, what can we do to nudge that government forward? And if we've badgered that government into letting us launch drones in and from their territory, and that's discrediting the very government

we're trying to work with, well, what's that mean in terms of our, broader foreign policy. These are hard questions. I won't claim to have hard and fast answers to them. I'm enjoying the academic luxury of

pointing out challenges. So I would say that this idea that you, or this policy, that we send up a Reaper or whatever, we find the SIM card of the leader

that we're trying to kill we fire a hellfire missile at them. Sometimes it's the new hellfire missile that has the spinning blades. Was something that kind of typified or was pioneered in the Obama administration, right? And I'm wondering if you can tell me if how that policy has fared in the Trump and the Biden administration. Is it kind of just the same thing? I think it's declined a lot. And saw, I don't have the numbers in front of.

of me, it declines some under Trump when we're droning less in general, is my impression. And it's declined a lot under Biden. The only one I can think of is Zawahari. And again, there's a guy, you know, if there's a guy that's going to be on your list and there's not going to be a lot of debate about it would have been, I'm an al-Zawahari. Well, we got Solimani too, right? Trump. That's right. I mean, we did do others. And of course, you know, we got Baghdadi. We got Baghdadi. that was actually a special forces raid, right? I'm not making a distinction between specific method. But overall, I mean, the Obama administration was launching,

was doing a lot of drone warfare. And it's definitely, it's definitely declined. I think Biden has definitely so. So both Biden and Trump were trying to reorient our foreign policy. Trump, perhaps, with a little bit less coherence. But he did have certain, you know, I just have to step back and say, you know, in my class at the University of Maryland on decision making, I say, look, whatever you think of Donald Trump, he thought we should get out of Afghanistan. Yeah, the process started under him. It's not an indefensible position to say that we shouldn't have been in Afghanistan.

You can disagree, but it's not a ridiculous argument to make. So I'm always trying to be diplomatic. But Biden is more, I think, coherently. So, like, we need to be reorienting our foreign policy. We have large-scale nation-state war in Europe, which is the heart of our interests. We've got the rising China. So, you know, chasing people around in far off corners of the world may not be in our interest. And I think he probably does recognize the costs of droning people in friendly or semi-friendly nations.

Do the justifications change over the years? Like, I'm wondering if, is there a period where we say, like, we're doing this because we think that this is the best use of our resources and terminating leaders, we, the theory is that it will make the rest of the organization collapse. Are there other times where we just say, like, we think this guy's a bad guy and this is the retribution for him being a bad guy? I think both of those arguments exist. and are made concurrently. I think, though, and again, this is just my opinion. I, you know, I didn't do my homework. I didn't prep.

I didn't do the reading. But, you know, under, it seems crazy, but under Obama, 9-11 was 10 years ago. We're now more than 20 years away. So Obama also sought to, you know, reduce our ground presence and drones were a substitute. It was a way to hit the bad guys without. having people on the ground and taking American casualties. Understandable. Was it the right policy?

Don't know. Again, I'm very sympathetic to the decision makers. Now I do think it's going to be, I think the argument's going to weigh towards justice because the active foreign terrorist threats to the United States seem a little bit less salient. And when they do occur, it's sort of the domestic lone, you know, lone wolf type thing, where there isn't there isn't quite the foreign leader to go after

whatever the origin of the domestic actor there isn't somebody abroad that it makes sense quite makes the same kind of sense to target but so Zawahri was under the argument of you know this is justice more than it's perhaps more than it's necessary

operationally although I don't know it's very possible that it wasn't you know I don't have access to that kind of information. It's very possible it was necessary operationally. It's hard to imagine the Pentagon or whoever may be in charge of the drone, firing a hellfire missile at a suburban home in Georgia to eliminate the leader of a

terror cell that was going to blow up part of the power grid, right? Well, first of all, I think there's some pretty significant legal issues there. And secondly, we do have police. You know, so that was, by the way, another thing in my paper, which is, look, if you can arrest somebody, that means you know a lot, have a lot more access to their operations. And there's a, there's a wonderful book on this by Jacob Shapiro from, he's at Princeton. Have him on your show. He's, he's much better than me. But I don't really know by the way. I'm just, all right, man, Matthew, stop recording. Stop recording, Matthew. We're going to move on. Shapiro, that's who we need.

I don't know the guy. I just know his works good. He talks about the terrorist's dilemma that maintaining a clandest, an organization that has to be clandestine over distance, it's a non-state actor, there's a lot of real challenges. How do you keep control? And this has implications for removing leaders in a couple of dimensions. One is, if you remove certain leaders, then the control of the center fades even more, and lower level officials may freelance and be more bloodthirsty than the leaders. That is one possible phenomenon. Are there instances in the larger organizations thinking,

like the Kud's Force, or Hezbollah, which you said is, you know, like a proto nation, which I think is accurate, or proto state, rather, you said, which is accurate, where there is a leader that has a certain set of skills, a cult of personality, an ability and a respect within that group where assassinating them makes sense and sets that group back. And here again, I am thinking about Soleimani. So that's a great question. I would say if the group is robust at all, it has gone around, it has gone around building itself around a single individual. You know, being a, think of organizations as organisms, right? Evolution in a complex, competitive, challenging environment. So you need to get your organizational act together if you're going to survive. If you're reliant on one person, one person's always vulnerable.

You know, plenty of terrorist leaders just die, right? People, well, we all do act, I think. So I'm not sure if that's, if that's the case. There is the argument that Soleimani was a unique, compelling, charismatic leader and nobody could run the IRGC like him. I don't know about that. I just don't know. I've certainly heard that argument.

Is there no one who could replace Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah? I think, I don't know. I mean, he's been there for a long time. He is certainly a dynamic, charismatic figure. Would they go to a lower ebb and then come back? But would they just fall apart? I mean, this is an organization with, I think, tens of thousands of, of members with finances and with state support.

So I'm not so sure they'd fall apart so easily. When you have the small group that can be effective and you can remove the leader, maybe, the reason I mentioned Jacob Shapiro's work before was when you really want to take apart a terrorist group, you need to get inside their decision making. Because again, that's why I was explaining they have those gaps between the leaders and the soldiers, right? Because maintaining communications is hard, and if you can get inside the organization,

you can mess of them. You saw that as the FARC was coming apart. It, you know, the Colombian military and intelligence was all over their internal command. And Colombia is actually a huge country, so the groups were really dispersed. I think there was the famous rescue of the woman, Beton,

who'd run for president. The commander of the group holding her took a call, believing it was his FARC boss, and it was actually a Colombian officer, right? That's how penetrated they were. Another great case is the Abu Nidal organization. So before, this is back 70s and 80s, these guys were insane and bloodthirsty. This is way before Al-Qaeda, but they were awful. Abu Nidal was really insane, paranoid freak.

We could not penetrate his. organization to save our lives because, well, he was an insane paranoid freak. We could, however, convince him that we had, and he ended up, like, murdering his subordinates, which is sort of, you know, that's rough, but Abouineda was awful. The world was not, was better off for him being, for his organization being reduced, dramatically reduced in capacity. But that's really hard to do. So if, if you've got the guy's SIM card, can you get farther in?

Does it make sense to take them out or watch what they do? See who they meet. This is inside baseball. And again, I don't have access to what intelligence agencies are doing in the space. I can only speculate. And again, it may be very hard. Yeah, we have the SIM card, but they know enough to change it. So we're not going to have it forever.

And this is when we can target them. It's a very hard call. But I am skeptical of the argument that a robust terrorist group fold so easy. if you take out a key person. There may be other reasons if you understand the organization. But they're not just going to fault. Well, it's the same with nations, right? I mean, you change history by assassinating anybody.

More prominent, obviously, the larger than the immediate change. But even William McKinley, who was known mostly for being assassinated, he obviously I mean it changed the course of American history right but I guess you really can't quantify that it's funny you mentioned McKinley you know I have a whole other life I am one of the top 10 experts in the world on the vice presidency and with that comes some knowledge of the I know I'm one of the top 10 because there's only six of us do you want to have us on for a roundtable

I can gather us we're all waiting for the phone to ring but I mean And it's an open, here you get, I mean, this is one of the fundamental questions of, you know, history and really political science. How much is it can, you know, decisions made by specific people, the actions of specific people, and how much of it is broad historic forces? You know, did McKinley's assassination change things? Well, the 1910s, the 1900s and 1910s were actually a crazy time in American history when all sorts of thing, unbelievable, you know, there was a, there was a major progressive movement that crossed all party lines. McKinley was a politician. He might have had to go along with that, whatever his instinct.

So tough to know. It's just tough to know. But I don't know the inside dynamics of Hamas anymore. But since this was started out around Ismail Haniyah, you know, I'm just thinking through sort of the list of things to consider. Supposedly, he was a moderate. I've got little finger quotes up within Hamas. I don't know if that's true. He's certainly at some point, but within an organization like Hamas, the external

leadership, which was involved with raising money and relating to the international community, had incentives to say nicer things. Again, this is within a spectrum. He's still called Israel the evil Zionist entity that has to be destroyed and all of that. was so was he somebody that you could deal with who was pregnant? I don't know. On the other hand, was it just a matter of here's an opportunity, and this is a group that killed a bunch of our citizens,

and we have to take this. Were they thinking about the internal Hamas dynamics or a step beyond because of where he was killed in the heart of Tehran in an IRGC-run base was Israel sending a message to Iran saying, have no illusions about what a conflict with us will involve. So again, this is, I mean, this is the stuff I teach, like just the layers upon layers of decision making. And of course, there are, it's fair to say the Israeli leadership has some domestic concerns about its, one can be a deep friend of Israel, so love Israel and not be 100% sure that its current leadership is making decisions in the best interest in the state.

versus in the interest of their own political survival. But that could have been part of it too. I would say that conflict with Israel always involves Israel doing assassinations, right? I can't think of another modern state. And you will hopefully correct me if I'm completely wrong here because I'd be interested to know. But when I think about Israel,

fighting war and getting into just general like any kind of conflict with the groups around it and the countries around it, it's going to assassinate some people. It has been in Iran and assassinated people before this, right? Like there's nuclear scientists that are dead because of Israel. Yes. So it's not just terror. It's not, it's interesting there because that's perhaps a more effective tool, right? because those are people with specialty knowledge. You remove them from that,

remove them from the country violently, and the nuclear program is set back. Yeah. So I would say there is another country that seems to use targeted killings. That would be us. So Israel's not willing. There. Much of this is capacity.

Well, and I hate to put us in the same category, but Russia assassinate its dissidents abroad pretty often. It does love to poison a journalist that Russia, yeah. Or throw you out of window. Domestically, you get thrown out a window. If you're outside of the country and criticizing it, you're going to get really sick and they're not going to figure out why. Although wasn't one of the people we sent back to Russia in the recent prisoner swap,

he was in German prison and he did just shoot a dissident. So, you know, I hate, again, I hate that my country, and that Israel are in the same category as Russia, although I would say that there are some differences. So we get into sort of the founding ideas, you know, of Israel. Remember, this is a state that was established to defend a people, a people whose existence had been threatened, and they just, you know, part of this is we're just going to have to hit people back until they don't hit us.

And sometimes that's worked, by the way. we may be running into a point where different strategy, where they might need to explore different strategies. But there are definitely periods in its history where that has made sense. The nuclear scientists is an interesting question. I'm not an expert on nuclear affairs. I know some and I have coffee with them and they try to explain things to me. You ever want to have them on your show? I can set you up.

But I think that both for the terrorist groups and for the nuclear scientists, the threat of assassination adds noise to their lives. It just creates complications. Does removing these experts really harm the program? I'm not sure. If a state can get a hold of the fissionable material, they can get a nuke. I mean, this is technology that goes back to 1945.

But it doesn't help. Certainly there's a cost to, certainly it adds a cost. I think we might be over, it might, we might be overstating what that cost it is. On the other hand, Stuxnet would actually interfered

with the ability to create fissionable material. Yeah, that's at the back. Like that was a hard, you know, that was a hard, a hard limitation, a real hit to the program. All right, Angry Planet listeners, we're going to pause here for a little break,

but we'll be right back. Welcome back to Angry Planet. So I want to switch gears if we can here in the middle. That's a big problem for me, as you can tell. I really... You, your current obsession, I would say, if I can call it an obsession. is vice president.

Oh, yeah. Why? For the jury, he rubbed his hands. He did. He got very excited the minute I mentioned vice president. I like to talk about terrorists, too. Yeah. But, and there, so I was sort of building, I, I done a fair amount of work on terrorism.

I decided to, I, my work at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computing study, computer studies, where I worked with cutting edge computer scientists, modeling terrorist group behavior. I can talk about that a bit. I had the opportunity to get a PhD. And I thought, well, I could study terrorism, but this is the mid-2000s. Vice presidents are sounding interesting. And I was wondering how much farther I wanted to go on the terrorism thing.

And I happened to be studying with a guy named Mac Dessler. who is one of the top scholars of the national security process. And he got really excited about this. I had some good contacts around the greater D.C. area, so I thought I could get a hold of people who worked in various administrations and interviewed them. And it was also a chance, it doesn't confine you to a specific issue. You look across the issues because the most significant vice president, influential vice presidents have really been across the board advisors.

And then finally, it was the human side. You know, again, it's the mid-2000s, the mid-aughts, as we all say, when, first of all, vice presidents seemed kind of important. And also just, we just made a bunch of big national security decisions. And I wanted to sense, what do these people do all day? How does this happen? How does it come about? Why do things go right?

Why do things go wrong? And it was a great way to delve into it. By the way, we are talking about Dick. Call him Dick. Jane Estimable Dick Cheney. For those of you who may not, the man who worked for, what, four years in an undisclosed location? Perhaps one of the most powerful and consequential vice presidents of all time. Well, hold on.

Our professor is now looking at that one. We're living in one of those silences. one of the hardest questions, one of the hardest, the hardest, like, five pages of my dissertation was on Dick Cheney in Iraq. Because to what extent did he push that? And I think that if W. hadn't thought that Iraq was important, he would have said, Dick, I don't want to hear about Iraq anymore. Drop it.

That the idea, I don't think Cheney was quite the puppet master. He pushed it, but ultimately it's the president's decision. Another thing that Cheney did was, you know, he was the architect of the domestic surveillance. And what's interesting to me there is, I find it hard to believe that after 9-11, we were not going to have extended domestic surveillance. Like, if Ralph Nader had somehow become president, he still would have wanted to get a hold of that information. 9-11 happened. Cheney went about it in an interesting, the way he went about it.

I wrote a little thing about this. This is, if you remember from Greek mythology, Escalis, Agamemnon, I'm getting a little, I'm getting a little bit down the road, but I'm talking about humorous and fatal,

fatal flaws. Cheney always, forget about Agamemnon, Cheney always chose secrecy, whether he needed it or not, right? Like, if you don't have to disclose something, don't. And look, sometimes that was a virtue. I'm not saying that's always wrong, but given the choice between those paths,

you know, he got into a whole spat about who he met with for the Energy Commission. And it was mostly that matter of principle that, well, I don't have to disclose it. So I shouldn't. With the, when, with the accidental shooting, which, I mean, this was terrible. But instead of, look, when something like this happens, you just come right out at the beginning. That's crisis management 101.

And instead, he sort of hold up. He told some people, like, that's not. So with the domestic surveillance said, we need to keep a tight loop so nobody finds out. We keep this as tight as possible because it's going to leak. It's going to get us into trouble. And as he pushed this forward, he had that, they had that confrontation with Ashcroft and Comey. And when Bush found out about it, like Cheney was trying to keep this off of the president's plate, he thought he was being a good vice president.

When Bush saw it was like, I'm going to, the entire Department of Justice is going to resign on me. That's a political disaster. He dialed it back. And now, if they had not attempted that level of secrecy from the beginning, they might have gotten similar policies but on a sounder legal. footing. So that's a long way of talking about some of the influence Cheney had. By the way, what he meant, he shot a friend. He actually

was out on a pheasant shoot, if I remember right? I think it was quail. I was at a trivia night where that came up and I picked the wrong bird. Well, but when Bush, sorry, when Cheney shot this guy in the face, and I'm sorry, I don't remember his name, it was referred to as being peppered. Well, okay.

All right. With bullets. I love that. To be fair. He didn't get shot in the face with buckshot or like a 44 caliber slug or something. It was birdshot. Like these things happen when you're out shooting pheasant. Or quail. Matthew was just volunteered to go shooting with me and we're going to test this theory out.

I'm not a hunter. This is a little out of my ken. I will say we've only had two vice president. shoot people in office. But since we're here and having fun, I'm going to make my case for Aaron Burr, that the modern vice presidents were significant as sort of super staffers, unique advisors to the president. I'm going to argue that Aaron Burr was the most significant vice president as vice president. What am I talking about? Okay. He shoots Alexander. Hamilton. Dooling is illegal in New Jersey, so there's a warrant out for him. Dooling is not

illegal in D.C., so he comes back to D.C. in the vice president account. As one does, there was a federal judge who was senign, and he was impeached, and the Senate tried him and removed him. It had to be done. The guy needed to be removed from the bench. Aaron Burr presided over these hearings with professionalism and equanimity. All praised his behavior. Now, we're in 1804. If you go back in your American history, Thomas Jefferson had run the table. He ran, you know, he had the presidency, he had both houses.

The federalists were gone. The only resistance to Jefferson's regime was the Supreme Court under his cousin. John Marshall. Jefferson launched this impeachment and trial of a federal judge and got an idea. And he mentioned to Burr that, you know, we could impeach Supreme Court justices. And they did. They impeached a Supreme Court justice. And then Burr was to preside over the trial.

And by all accounts, he did so in an utterly fairhanded manner, in a manner that did not allow a highly political conviction of the justice, because he was not unfit for office. Jefferson was just seeing if he could bring the Supreme Court under his control. And Burr's conduct was widely praised. Had Burr not done that, would we have an independent Supreme Court? Had Burr said, I'm going to save my political future by tagging myself to Jefferson to do his bidding and get this guy off the court. Would we have an independent Supreme Court?

I'm going to make this very odd argument that Aaron Burr was an incredibly significant vice president, perhaps a terrible person. Samuel Chase, who I believe had the nickname Old Bacon Face, but I could be wrong. But there wasn't really, like, they didn't really have charges. Jefferson was just seeing if you get control of the judiciary, too. Why do we say nice things about Jefferson again? Hey, Louisiana Purchase was kind of a big deal. All that wonderful writing and the dumbwaiter.

You can't say no to the dumbwaiter. waiter? Who's your, do you have a favorite vice president? I am always caught. I like Walter Mondale because I actually got to interview. I also really like Charles Dawes, who was a terrible vice president, but an amazing human being. He was the vice president to Calvin Coolidge. He was a, he was a very successful businessman who helped, you know, he ran for Senate, held government offices, the kind of things that rich guys get to do if they want. All right. So Dawes, as a middle-aged man, signs up to join World War I, rapidly gets promoted to

Brigadier General because he's a logistical genius, won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on German Reconstruction after World War I. and on the basis of all these accomplishments, he's nominated for vice president. During the campaign, he's campaigning and they say, hey, when you go here, don't mention the Ku Klux Klan. At this point, remember, the Ku Klux Klan was actually a major constituency of the Democratic Party. Dawes was a Republican. So Dawes, of course, gives a speech excoriating the Ku Klux Klan. He also was involved in the naval.

arms limitations talks, which really ended up being the intellectual basis for later strategic arms limitation talks. He was a terrible vice president, though. His most famous active vice president was falling asleep during a critical vote and Coolidge losing the bill. But here's the thing to put some over the top. He was a composer. He composed a tune that after he died in the 50s was set to me.

music and became the song, It's All in the Game. And it was a bit like a Billboard hit in 1950-something. So just between all that, he was an amazing person. Terrible vice president. I assume he never attempted to seek the higher office himself. Not really. And Hoover was sort of, Hoover was such a national celebrity. Hoover.

And, you know, had he won, he would have been the president for the Depression. So maybe for the best. Why was Hoover such a... Okay, I'm sorry. I know we're going off. Matthew, you want me to stop? No, no, this is great. Okay.

Why was Hoover so well known? Oh, he... So he had overseen food relief to Germany after World War I. And that made him a national figure. And then he'd been a cabinet member. And, you know, in the sort of Lucy Goosey Harding administration, he was the guy who had his act together. He was our, I guess he would be our second wealthiest president in history, but he completely made it himself. So it's like a logistical in business, or was until the Great Depression considered like a logistical and business genius, right?

Right. He just had the misfortune to be president when the Great Depression hit. I think it was Harry Truman who said, you know, I'm running around the country yelling about Hoover. Hoover didn't cause the depression any more than you or me. It fell on him. And he did not handle it well. Right. Now, the thing you can really ding him for is the bonus army when he sent the army out and they ended up killing a much of the bonus army. The bonus army is a great American story that like no one knows.

it's one of my favorite pieces of like American military history. Will you please tell us what happened? And especially some of the characters involved. Well, I might need your help. I can do that. But basically, when the Depression hit, a group of veterans became concerned they wouldn't have their benefits paid and they sort of marching on Washington. And the national security infrastructure is not a lot of.

what it was. Like, local police were not nearly as formidable and capable as they are now. So you've got the sort of massive men moving on Washington. Hoover got a little panicky and sent the army out led by Douglas MacArthur and his chief of staff, Dwight Eisenhower. Their riot, I don't remember all the details, but their riot control skills were not great. And they ended firing on this. Yeah, it was like, it was like 40,000 people, half, of them veterans of World War I, march on Washington, and then build

what they would call Hoovervilles back then. They built encampments around the White House demanding their back, like their back pay that they were owed. And yeah, they, to get them off the lawn,

essentially, they go out there, led by Douglas MacArthur and like roused all these veterans. And yeah, there was, I don't think the Army did it, but the cops, the local cops like shot some people. Yeah, so you can imagine

this did not go over well with anybody. And there's all these, there's like, it's one of these things that, like, we just don't remember for whatever reason. And there's all these incredible pictures of MacArthur leading troops to go push out veterans

and burn down these shacks. I'll dig some of them up and put them in the show notes. Looks like Patton was there as well. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I was just about to One of the upshot of this is they sent MacArthur off to the Philippines where he stayed

with Eisenhower. So Eisenhower, Eisenhower got out of the Philippines and got back to the states a couple years before World War II where he built a reputation within the army. But yeah,

McArthur's like, just stay out there. I just, I wanted to double check something before I said it, but it is accurate. They rolled out World War I era tanks as well to like

smash down the Hoovervilles and push people out. And there's photos of it. Right. I think MacArthur became convinced this was the beginning of a revolution. And, you know, we forget how things... Obviously, shooting on the marching veterans was a terrible thing. But it's another guy, Frank Gavin, has a wonderful essay that I have my students read about, reading history with critical empathy,

sort of seeing people where they were at the time. You know, he mentions, I think, Bob McNamara under LBJ would be having a meeting about the Vietnam War, which was obviously a bloody disaster. And that same day, he'd have a meeting about the nonproliferation treaty and how we would establish that.

And that's actually been a tremendous success. Same guy, same day. So just what did the world look like from where someone was sitting at that time? The communist revolution was not some distant thing. And it happened a little more than a decade before. And they were supposedly exporting it around the world. And we were in a Great Depression. We were right for communist revolution.

Was MacArthur right to shoot at veterans? Of course not. What did it look like to him? And then can we look forward and think, how not to make those mistakes. How to be a little broader and smarter. Well, I mean, no one really fired on the protesters on January 6th.

Well, Ashley Babbitt would disagree. Well, so that's a whole other space. I'm not terribly knowledgeable about it, but the whole realm of sublethal force where the police knew if they started shooting, they knew the crowd was armed and might be better armed. I mean, it happens with. nation states too. I mean, this is what the Chinese are doing in the east and south China seas. It's coast guards and they're shooting water cannons at each other and they're ramming.

They're not shooting shooting. Then it becomes war. That's a different story. It's a fascinating realm that is far removed from this terrorism stuff that you started with, but you know. Cyber warfare apparently doesn't count either as actual war. People don't normally get shot after a country performs cyber warfare on another country. Right? I mean, Russia certainly tried it on the U.S. We're still not actually shooting each other at the moment. And this is a really big, complicated strategic problem set. What are the appropriate responses?

And if you don't actually want to have, you know, because usually you don't want to have a war. So what's a response that will keep things inbound? And you get into the complicated world of signaling that the message you think you're sending is not perceived the same way. There's a vast literature on this that I know a little bit about. I would love to, you know, in my copious free time, I need to know more. But coming back to when Israel hit Hania in the heart of Tehran, they're sending a message going, we don't think this is going to escalate. This is a message to encourage them not to escalate. How is that calculation made.

I don't know. And you're seeing, we're facing the same issue with Ukraine. I was just reading criticism that the U.S. has been much too cautious and risk-averse in allowing the Ukrainians to do things, which that could be a fair argument. It's hard for me not to be sympathetic to the administration saying, yeah, but it's Russia. And we want to be real careful about where we push this. Again, I don't know the right answer.

I'm just saying I can see the challenge. I think my problem with that line of thinking is always, I feel like to a certain extent Ukraine is going to do what it wants to do. And the other than the amount of arms and ammunition that are sent has a limited amount of control over what Zelensky orders the military to do, right? and they can always turn around and say, fuck you, they're coming into the country and kidnapping our kids. And do you see what happened in Boucha?

Like, you guys aren't here. I don't know. It's like from a great remove. We have this tendency to think of America, like think of America as having way more control over its allies that I think actually is the case. We think of allies.

And we've talked about this on the show before. We think of them as proxies when they often aren't. I think that's fair. I think with Ukraine, it's, well, we're not going to give you this system because it can do things that we're concerned about. And you're like, well, that system would have been super helpful. So, and again, I don't know the right decision. And it's, I'm certainly not inclined to criticize the Ukrainians who are fighting, you know, they are truly fighting an existential battle. I would say it is useful to remember, you know, at the height of our presence in Afghanistan, we could not get the Afghan government to do what we wanted.

When we basically owned that government, paid for it, defended it. We couldn't get them to do the things we wanted. So go figure we can't get Ukraine or Israel or whoever to do what we want. Afghan is a great example. The central government was almost an elaborate con that was established just to accept contractor in USA. It was an alabricon with a great hat, though. Do you remember his hat? I do remember his hat.

Great. Great hat. Did you see, it was the three-year anniversary of the withdrawal the other day, and the Taliban had a long, big military parade where they rolled out all of the helicopters and up armored Humvees and things that we left behind? It was quite the striking image. They can get together with the Vietnamese. and every other place we were and bring out the shit we left behind. Does anyone ever shoot

vice presidents? Did you see? I actually wrote an extended analysis on this question. This is why I'm asking, yes. So I thought, like, let's look at this because in, sometime in the 1910s, Woodrow Wilson's vice president,

Thomas Marshall, a very funny man. He, he's one point sent, Wilson a note from your one and only vice. Just as one example. I mean, but he was just famous for being funny more than he can. So he's in Denver and he notices this big burly guy following Ryan.

He's like, what are you doing? He's like, I'm Denver police. I'm making sure nobody you're safe. Because find me the man insane enough to shoot the vice president. Right. But that was sort of,

I mean, it's funny, but actually this was the, 1910s, the anarchist political violence was worldwide. McKinley, and for that matter, a bit before that, not that long before that Garfield, and Lincoln had all been shot in living memory. Teddy Roosevelt was shot on the campaign trail in 1912. Being Roosevelt, he gave his speech anyway, and it was like two hours.

So I thought, well, let's look at that. Because if you look at assassination attempts on the president, okay, crazy is a complex loaded term. But let's say, did they have political goal? I mean, it's more of a spectrum of did they have political goals that make sense versus were they John Henckley, whose goals are not graspable by most people? Shulgosh versus Gutel, basically. Yes. So with the presidents, it's like 50-50, right? A lot of it, but with vice presidents, I would argue that the attempts on vice presidents

made a kind of sense relative to the logic of their time. So the first one we get to go back to Burr and Hamilton. The Burr-Hamilton duel is there, it's reenacted every year. There's a great deal of discussion about it. my own gut feeling is usually when people had duels they both went out they waved their pistols around they shot in the air and they declared honor restored something happened where berth thought that hamilton was actually shooting at him you know it's easy enough to imagine an accident and said well i better do it first that's what i'm guessing happened within the context

of the time where having duels for honor was something people did B. Burr thought his life was in jeopard. So that's example one. The second example, when John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln, there was actually a plan to decapitate the U.S. government. Someone else went after Secretary of State seward and actually got in there and stabbed him, but his son thought him off. The guy who was supposed to kill Johnson had been sort of staking out Johnson's rooming house. kind of amazing that the president

that vice, the president had the white house, but vice president's centers, they were living in boarding houses. What was D.C. like? Anyway, he'd staked out the, the boarding house,

but he got drunk and whipped out. But this was actually a coherent plan to decapitate the U.S. government and then hopefully somehow restore slavery or the Confederacy or whatever Wilts was doing. But it did have a kind of logic.

Other examples, we have to jump ahead a little bit. Richard Nixon, as Eisenhower's vice president, was almost torn apart by a mob in Caracas. They'd just had a leftist revolution. There were some talk that they should just cancel the trip. And, yeah, this mob was like coming at Nixon's limo. and, you know, the presidents and vice presidents didn't travel with quite the same level of escort. So he had a secret service detail, and they were getting ready to shoot. And Nixon said, let's, if we start that, we're dead.

The mob will not stop. They made some quick turns, got away, and then were protected by the Venezuelan military. But again, this was an anti-American mob within the politics of the time. it made sense. It was not an incoherent act. We fast forward ahead to Dick Cheney in, I think it was 2006. He went to, I guess, Bagram, a big base in Afghanistan. I remember when it happened, and I wrote an article saying, well, this is probably just happenstance.

It turns out it wasn't. The Taliban knew Cheney was there. So again, that makes sense. Target of opportunity. And, of course, our most recent example is Pence, where again, by the logic of the mob, they were going to change the results of the election. So it really strikes me that it's the opposite of what Marshall says that attempts to assassinate vice presidents have not been conducted by crazy people. They've been conducted by people or groups that had a purpose. I can't help but note that of these attempts, two have occurred in this century.

On an intuitive level, I feel like when the vice president starts to become significant formally, not informally as an advisor to the president, but formally, that's not a good sign. That's not great for the health of the republic. You know, it's not an assassination, but the fact that Harris broke more ties in the Senate than any vice president since John Calhoun. Again, not great. The fact that we're talking about the vice president's completely ceremonial role in the transition of power. Like, the vice president has no authority. It's just ceremonial. But the fact that we're talking about it is not, again, just not a great sign.

That's the kind of ominous tone we like to strike at the end of an angry planet episode. Aaron, thank you so much for coming onto the show and walking us through this. Where can people find your work? You can find me. I have two websites, vicepresidency.org and Aaron Manus.com. You can guess what's on one of those sites, and then everything else I do is on the other. And I'm on Twitter, A.W. Manus. This is a blast. Thanks so much.

You've been listening to Angry Planet. created by Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. We'll be back next week with another exciting episode. We appreciate all of our listeners, but I want to especially shout out to the subscribers to our substack. It helps us keep going and lets us know that people are out there and care about the show. Anything that you feel like giving us on Substack will be greatly appreciated. Thank you again.

and we'll talk at you very soon.